Assembla.com and some others integrate everything (WEB cam, chat, wiki, git/svn, blokg) in one low cost WEB based application

wxWidgets emLib http://larytet.sourceforge.net/ are two options I used. emLib is available in LGPL - contact the author.

VLC (videoLAN) uses wxWidgest Multi-thread application which is fairly close to what embedded application looks like

Emlib is a thin wrapper. No sockets though. http://larytet.sourceforge.net/

One answer - go for Linux if you want to avoid single vendor point of failure. Go for commercial Linux like TimeSys if you insist to pay money.

may be better hardware threads support ? better support of the Atom chip sets ? may be INTC wants it's own Android with 1000s existing clients ? and may be INTC wants to get rid of WinCE ?

check http://gomyplace.com/ it is not fully implemented, but if you are interested i can bring the product to the production phase fairly quick and make it embeddable. integration with vxWorks is not a problem. Or just consider the idea. hardware reboots - there are relays which can be controlled remotely, including HTTP interface. Again I could help you here - i can reverse engineer software for the existing hardware and put support you need, like SSL or SSH. Also you can consider developing of the hardware - this is not prohibitively expensive as many think. Such hardware can be sold as a separate and profitable product. The market of remotely controlled relays still is limited.